May 15 - We went to Morton Island. This was a really fun day! We saw dolphins in the harbour as we were leaving on the ferry to the island. It was a 2 hr boat ride to the island and you could see the ship wrecks as you pulled in. There isn't a dock, the boat just grounds itself on the sand and lets down the back of the boat as a drive way off. The first truck down got stuck in the sand so the boat - the Combi Trader II - had to disembark, move over, and dock again. We were with a small tour group in 1 4x4 jeep thingy. The first thing we did on the island was drive across the beech (getting at least 1 ft of clearance from our seats when we went over bumps) to the sand blow. The sand blow is a small dessart that forms naturally on the island b/c it is a sand island. It just blows across the island at something like 1m. a yr (speeding landscape!) covering everything it comes across. It goes right over trees which survive and continue growing when the dune's passed. There are several of them which make up a dessert. We went toboggoning down the biggest sand dune we could find there. I got a mouth full of sand and several cuts and scrapes on my first slide down. PI didn't, so he went again. This time he had a movie moment. He was sitting on his board and it broke in half. He held the broken piece, looked at it, threw it away, and did spectacular whipe out cartwheels down the rest of the dune. I REALLY wish I'd gotten it on film, but we'd left the cameras in the car b/c we didn't want to get sand in them. When we were finished on the dune we went for another drive. We stopped at a camp site further inland where we had lunch and tried to snorkle in the lagoon there. The only problem with that was that the lagoon was FREEZING. It's fed from an underground, fresh water spring (I think), and it's winter in Australia. The rest of the day was spent at a look out on the cliffs where the light house sits, playing in tidal pools...




...chasing crabs, and things like that. Then we took the ferry home. We watched Cinderella Man that night.

May 16 - This was a much needed rest day. We went to the post office to mail post cards, walked the dogs, and watched Map of the World and The Life Aquatic.



May 17 - For the first time it rained today! Luckily, it was an indoor day and we didn't care that it was pouring. We went to Underwater World! Here we watched an otter show, a seal show, a sting ray show, and, oh yeah! we went swimming with sharks in their shark tank!



...to be continued...